Re: Poring cold water on it....

What on earth are you talking about? The only reason Microsoft overtook Amazon for Cloud Revenue was because they started including O365 (and now Dynamics 365) revenues in their collective revenue figures - it's a point that is constantly on everyone's lips on the Microsoft quarterly revenue calls, but gets shut down every time (a bit like Apple never actually declaring how well (or not) their Apple Watch sales are - they just don't separate it out).

Last quarter Microsoft had 500m active Azure subscriptions, AWS had almost 1.7bn!

Don't get me wrong I like Azure, and O365 (they have over 100m business O365 subscribers and 57m personal O365 subscribers). But if you're going to quote statistics and "facts" at least check them first before just arbitrarily making them up - you could have just used Google after all (or maybe even Bing)!

And that's the point that SO many people miss! I love it when they tell me their ISP gives them a 200Mbps internet connection, and I tell them - no they don't! They give you 200Mbps connection to their network, that's not the same as a 200Mbps connection to the Internet!

Spot on! Which is why you can be sure that after the 5 years of this contract they will most definitely exercise the 3 year extension clause - means as long as the licence fee keeps rolling in then they won't have to worry about running a procurement until 2025!

Re: Microsoft does not care

I’m not sure I understand the point you’re trying to make (other than the usual “Microsoft are evil and we all hate them <blah> <blah> <blah>…”

You say “Microsoft does not care about the non corporate user base” but this move absolutely does harm to the corporate user base - almost exclusively.

A consumer buying a new PC today with the latest Intel Kaby Lake chipset will likely buy the PC complete with an OS. It is highly probable that the OS bundled with that PC will be Windows - and the vendor will install Windows 10 (not least because the drivers to support the Kaby Lake chipset on Windows is only for Windows 10). There won’t be many consumers that will be buying a new PC to run a previous version of Windows on - that’s for sure.

However, there will be many corporates who will! They will do a deal with the vendor to bulk buy PC hardware and (if bought in sufficient numbers) to buy without an OS. They will want to run a previous version of Windows (8.1 or 7) - just some of the reasons for this will be: -

- They have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement which already provides them with a Windows licence

- They don’t have Software Assurance with that EA agreement and therefore don’t have access to Windows 10 (thereby needing to run a previous version)

- They have specific Line of Business applications which are incompatible or not supported on Windows 10

- They have a corporate build of a previous version of Windows and now is not a good time for them to invest in creating a new one

Microsoft are absolutely not caring about the corporate user base here - the complete opposite of what you’re whinging about!

Re: Virgin Media should be beaten over their asymmetric mess

Supposedly during the Thatcher government in the 80's BT proposed a project to lay Fibre Optic cable to every premise in the UK at an exceptionally high cost (several billion pounds). The government canned the project deeming it too expensive and distracting from their goal to take BT public (IPO share offering) - and hence a great opportunity was scuppered.

I'm all for shared services...

The principle is absolutely sound - why on earth would you have multiple departments buying the same functional solutions from multiple vendors? The problem of course (as we all know) is the absolutely fantastic level of incompetence shown by those in charge of both setting up and running the Shared Service, along with those local departments that insist on the "I want to be in control and run things myself" attitude.

Intel have crippled themselves!

The reason why so many OEM's are not supporting Intel's Thunderbolt is because there is a mandatory requirement to deliver Video through it!

I firmly believe that if Intel relaxed this requirement, and under the terms of it's license allowed manufacturers to deliver everything but Video, then there would be a wider adoption of the technology.

Because OEM's are not delivering Thunderbolt, then Thunderbolt devices are few and far between - it's a real catch-22.

Until Intel relax this mandatory requirement then USB 3.0 will continue to win through. Thunderbolt is a great technology - but Intel have crippled it with stupid rules!